[124693] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: legacy /8
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Owen DeLong)
Sun Apr 4 04:23:33 2010
From: Owen DeLong <owen@delong.com>
In-Reply-To: <4BB6F65D.4000907@mompl.net>
Date: Sat, 3 Apr 2010 09:16:56 -0700
To: Jeroen van Aart <jeroen@mompl.net>
Cc: nanog@nanog.org
Errors-To: nanog-bounces+nanog.discuss=bloom-picayune.mit.edu@nanog.org
On Apr 3, 2010, at 1:03 AM, Jeroen van Aart wrote:
> Owen DeLong wrote:
>> It was thought that we would not have nearly so many people connected =
to the internet. It was expected that most things connecting to the =
internet would be minicomputers and mainframes.
>=20
> It took some visionary and creative thinking to "come up" with the =
internet. But given such a train of thought the idea of everyone being =
connected isn't such a wild idea. I can imagine it'd be almost a given.
>=20
You need a better view backwards in time to contextualize this.
The vision of everyone being connected was there. Everyone would have =
access to one or more of the
approximately 5 million or so minicomputers and mainframes that was =
expected to be connected to
the internet. It was based on 56kbit lines and the primary applications =
were email, ftp, and telnet.
(I believe in that order, too). IRC was added several years later.
> Although if I get the time frame right in those days you had 2 camps, =
those (ibm, dec...) who believed that there was no need for home =
computers and you only needed a few (hundred?) thousand big mainframes =
and minicomputers and those (commodore, apple...) who believed =
(rightfully so) there was going to be a big future and demand for home =
computers.
>=20
I believe the IPv4 classful addressing scheme (which some have pointed =
out was the second IPv4 addressing
scheme, I wasn't involved early enough for the first, so didn't remember =
it) predates commodore, apple, etc.
> So I guess depending on what "camp" you were in, it's not that strange =
to not envision all these household computers being interconnected.
>=20
At the time, connecting was very expensive. Getting one of the DS-0 =
circuits required in order to get on to the
backbone was more than $500/month in most locations.
Owen
